When I read a book, I tend to break its spine. By the time the last sentence is read, the cover is a little worn and the pages a tad more tattered. When I read Gone With the Wind last month, I ripped the book into two pieces because it was just too big to carry the whole thing around. When I finished The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, I threw it across the room and now it bears a mark of abuse, its front cover torn half off. When I read The Last Summer (of You and Me), I cried in its pages until the paper became permanently warped.
My books carry me with them, in their spines, on their pages, between the covers. The story on the pages becomes the story of my life, even if just for a week or a day or a morningless night where I read until the story ends. And for those days when I called myself a writer, even if it was something I only said in a whisper to no one, story demanded even more.
I loved the characters I created. They took my blood and my beating heart. They turned nights into blank canvases for imagining, and days into endless dreaming. Their grief was my heart’s ache, and their victories were my soul’s hope finally answered. But they cost me. Just like it costs me a little bit of my heart to love a story, it costs more of my heart to write one. Broken spines that say, “I was here, and this mattered.”
And this makes me wonder what it is going to cost to let God write my story. Will he break my spine? Will he break my heart? More importantly, will he put me back together afterward?
a scribble of jo 